Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac

  Pola Oloixarac’s book Dark Constellations is not so much a novel as a concept. Spanning three narratives over 142 years and condensed into a tight 202 pages, its cover review from AV Club touts that the book is “galactic in the stretch of its narrative ambitions.” The size of these ambitions, though, prevents the novel from feeling like any kind of story. It’s a speculative work that tries to combine so many underdeveloped concepts, which meant that by the time I had fifty pages left, I was dying for Oloixarac to just get on with it and bring the separate storylines together.

Sometimes a passing allusion gives a significant clue to a text. In this case, a passing reference to William Gibson’s Neuromancer hints at the aesthetic of the book, and, in my opinion, both books have a similarly alienating approach. There’s a kind of rapidity to the works, flashes of technological innovations that readers are immersed in without context, and producing a kind of whiplash of world-building. Admittedly, I’m betraying a lack of willingness to engage in challenging reading. Not that I want to have everything explained through exposition dumps, but the sheer number of concepts, characters, and decades is so alienating that the whole project of the book leaves me feeling cold and indifferent.

I’ll provide a brief summary here. I may have a number of details wrong.

Oloixarac presents three narratives. The first takes place in 1882 with a group of researchers (botanists? entomologists? evolutionary biologists?). From what I can tell, it involves a discovery of a kind of drug-like transcendence produced by licking flowers? It also seems to involve a kind of gross creature that burrows into peoples’ skins and then alters their minds. There is also maybe some kind of supernatural being or alien in an underground cave—is it a metaphor or literal? The second stage of the book takes place in 1983 and is focused around Cassio, the most developed of the endless train of characters. He is a budding hacker who works his way through systems and implants viruses. As his career continues, it seems that he has an idea of combining technology and living beings and later seems to be the human key to initiating a computer virus that crashes the economy briefly—that part takes place in 2024 and focuses on Piera, sort of, I guess. There’s some stuff about rats disguising themselves in human bodies, tracking the “dark constellations” of negative space in rat-movement patterns, a mass-surveillance system that seems to rely on olfactory knowledge of DNA. Everyone is always trackable at all times, despite the fact that humans are never single entities (the book notes that there is more bacteria in humans than whatever we consider as an identity).

I think the book is marred by several central flaws. First, there are too many characters and they come across as empty husks. Even at the climax of the book, Cassio’s betrayal of his company by unleashing a virus days before they sell the company is so obscure in its motivations that it fails to address the second of the central flaws (namely: it feels like there are no events.) I wouldn’t expect myself to align with Stephen King very often, but I recall he once gave writing advice that nobody cares about characters: people care about events. If the characters don’t do anything, there’s no reason to care about them. Oloixarac seems to ignore this advice, or rather I was so bewildered by everything happening in the book that it felt like nothing happened. These two issues contribute to the absolute core one: the novel lacks cohesion. The timeframe jumps around with very little overlap (with one exception being that Cassio and Piera work with one another)—and in fact, even the Cassio section span several years, so the timeframe is not clearly demarcated. The connection between licking plants and human viruses and olfactory surveillance systems is never explicitly addressed; it’s a sketch; it’s nodes of ideas—oh darn, it’s a constellation, isn’t it?

What makes the book interesting is its sociological bent. While again not feeling fully cohesive in the book, there are flashes of sexual politics inserted throughout that are engaging in their own right, if not fully explored in its implications for a posthumanist project. The posthumanist plurality of identity is worth exploring. The idea that none of us is singular, that we are influenced by other beings inside us, is a compelling premise that finds home in Dark Constellations. As I mentioned, I’m not entirely clear on whether aliens are real in the context of the novel. The way Oloixarac describes characters suggests alien inhabitation of their bodies, though reading it as a kind of techno-Marxist metaphor would be equally appropriate. Actually, referring back to the sexual politics of the book, I would say this alienation produces some of the grossest descriptions of sex I’ve read in a book: it’s a dissociated alien-like depiction that seems both medical and completely disgusting.

Overall, I have to say Dark Constellations has an interesting premise in exploring the morphing nature of symbiosis between humans and other entities, including technology as the next frontier, but ultimately leaves me scratching my head. Dark Constellations are the gaps between stellar configurations, a darkness the technophiles of the book are mapping (and thus erasing?) at the same time. The style of the book emulates those dark constellations: it feels like everything important about the book is happening between what is actually written. I started to read some reviews to see what other kinds of summary details would supplement my review, but even starting to read reviews I couldn’t help but feel: this isn’t worth my time. There isn’t enough there there.

Over and out.